Shelmalier

Taking her title from the Wexford fishermen who became gunmen in the Irish rising of 1798, McGuckian carries the sea changes in language she has elsewhere wrought in bodily tropes of waves, tides, liquidity, and blueness into poems where “the long, long dead / steer with their warmed breath / my unislanded dreams.” In poems that warm history into the living and breathing voice, McGuckian transforms the rebels’ “still unused voices” into “soon-to-be-living words” (“Rose Trellis”) that may yet resonate in an island where hope itself remains difficult two centuries later.